[mikelbring]

A lot of people I hear say they don't choose backbone because of the amount of stuff you have to write to get started, but they never mention backbone+marionette, which imo fixes a lot of the boilerplate code you have to write.

[andywhite37]

We've been using Backbone+Marionette at my company, and in general I like it, and it's much cleaner than just vanilla Backbone, but I still feel like it falls short for medium-to-large sized apps, and requires you to write a substantial amount of additional code, or include additional Backbone plugins. This might include things like "nested/deep" model support, two-way data-binding, etc. The main problem with the lightweight plugin model is that a lot of the plugins aren't necessarily compatible with others, or are not up-to-date on the latest Backbone changes, not to mention the varying degree in quality and maintenance of plugins, and the problem of choosing which data binding plugin you want, out of the 10+ available.

I think maybe we have just crossed the line from small, focused UI/interactions to large-scale single-page apps, and we would be better off with a more substantial/fully-featured framework like AngularJS or Ember.js.

[cmckeachie]

Thanks for the insights. Hit me up on twitter @cmckeachie if you would be willing to help me out by doing an interview on your experiences.

[tuxracer]

http://chaplinjs.org/ is also another great full featured framework on top of Backbone. Vanilla Backbone is more of a framework starter kit. I don't think it makes sense to compare it directly to frameworks like Ember or Angular.

[cmckeachie]

Oh no, something else cool I need to look into. Seriously, thanks for letting me know about this one it had slipped under my radar.

[sailfast]

Yeah, the author addresses some of this in the "Apples to Apples" section but doesn't get into details. I'd be interested to see which combination of smaller packages works well to achieve similar capabilities.

[cmckeachie]

I'll definitely do a future post on this topic. I've been thinking about doing it with the analogy of a food/wine pairing and going into which server side frameworks play well with client side frameworks in addition to the client side libraries that work well together. For example, emberjs and rails or knockout, sammyjs, durandaljs and .net web api on the server etc...